Pict is a language in the ML tradition, formed by adding a layer of convenient syntactic sugar and a static type system to a tiny core. The current release includes a Pict-to-C compiler, reference manual, language tutorial, numerous libraries, and example programs. The core language - an asynchronous variant of Milner, Parrow, and Walker's pi-calculus - has been used as a theoretical foundation for a broad class of concurrent computations. The goal in Pict is to identify high-level idioms that arise naturally when these primitives are used to build working programs - idioms such as basic data structures, protocols for returning results, higher-order programming, selective communication, and concurrent objects. The type system integrates a number of features found in recent work on theoretical foundations for typed object-oriented languages: higher-order polymorphism, simple recursive types, subtyping, and a powerful partial type inference algorithm.
Last modified 16 December 2024